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The UK government on Wednesday said it is extending to 2030 climate levy reductions for companies that meet emissions targets, among other measures to bolster the path to net zero and reassure investors in green industries, in a finance statement that was lighter on climate policy than some had hoped.

International stakeholders have ahead of COP28 called on world leaders to vastly improve monitoring, reporting, and verification of ocean-based climate activities, including carbon removals, to improve understanding of mitigation and adaptation strategies, in what has been coined the Dubai Ocean Declaration.

French economist says class inequality must be at centre of climate response and calls for progressive carbon taxes

• Who are the polluter elite and how can we tackle carbon inequality?

Questions of social and economic class must be at the centre of our response to the climate crisis, to address the huge inequalities between the carbon footprints of the rich and poor and prevent a backlash against climate policies, the economist Thomas Piketty has said.

Regulations will be needed to outlaw goods and services that have unnecessarily high greenhouse gas emissions, such as private jets, outsized vehicles, and flights over short distances, he said in an interview with the Guardian.

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The UN's Green Climate Fund (GCF) will look to ramp up its focus on attracting private capital as part of reforms to the mechanism, as it seeks to scale funding to $50 billion by 2030 and address criticism of its role in channeling climate finance, a senior member of the body told Carbon Pulse.

The Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) has launched a new accelerator programme to boost carbon finance in the clean cooking sector of West Africa.

Green group WWF has announced two biodiversity technology pilot projects it is developing that aim to automate biodiversity monitoring, and predict animal-related epidemic risks.

Saving the industry means saddling consumers with ever more debt. The fumes of 2007 are in the air

During lockdown in 2020, the local council in my neighbourhood of Levenshulme – a suburb of red-brick terraces in Manchester – proposed a low-traffic neighbourhood scheme. The plan generated substantial backlash among a segment of the community, leading to all kinds of rows and questionable behaviour on Facebook and elsewhere.

A central claim of the objectors was that people such as me who generally supported the measures were middle-class hippies intent on disrupting ordinary, working-class people who needed their cars in their day-to-day lives. At times, it seemed to touch on conspiracy theory. Supporters were cast as canny “gentrifiers”, who saw the planters being proposed to block traffic flow as an opportunity to increase the value of their properties.

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Lesley Hughes was one of the first scientists to warn that global heating could lead to species extinctions. Now one of Australia’s most influential climate science advocates, Hughes speaks with Guardian Australia about the importance of hope in the face of a crisis. ► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

This video is part of Weight of the World: a climate scientist's burden. The series features three pioneering Australian climate change scientists – Graeme Pearman, Lesley Hughes and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. The series tells the story of how the three scientists made their discoveries, how they came under attack for their science and the personal toll it has taken on them. And importantly, how they stay hopeful.

• See the other pieces in our series Weight of the world: a climate scientist’s burden

• ‘Where did I go wrong?’ The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm

• Podcast: The climate scientists who saw the crisis coming – Weight of the world, part 1

• If I was feeling hopeless about the climate, what of the scientists? So I asked them | Graham Readfearn

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The European Parliament rejected a text for a proposal to limit EU use of pesticides on Wednesday, in a vote that divided lawmakers amid similar tensions to those seen earlier in the year for the bloc's nature restoration bill.

Banks should set targets supporting countries’ national biodiversity strategies, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in its new nature target-setting guidance, released Wednesday.

European carbon prices fluctuated wildly on Wednesday morning, setting a new year-to-date low but ending the morning marginally higher, as traders positioned themselves both before and after the weekly Commitment of Traders data release, which showed investors had trimmed their net short for the first time in five weeks.

Chris Bowen will let the long-standing renewable energy target die, choosing instead a massive auction program seeking 32GW of new capacity to meet 82 pct renewable target.

The post Bowen dumps RET for 32 GW of auctions in massive policy shift to supercharge renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Staff at Chester zoo filmed the moment an endangered rhino gave birth to a female calf. The eastern black rhino was born on 12 November, unusually in daylight hours. The zoo said the species is listed as critically endangered, with fewer than 600 of the rhinos remaining in the wild across Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda

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Ship operators can optimise environmental performance and reduce emissions across entire fleets, helping them to more easily comply with international climate regulations, using a new simulator platform launched Wednesday that will later be adjusted to assist with EU ETS compliance.

North Carolina residents push back against environmental agency bringing 4m lbs of ‘forever chemical’ waste to region

The federal US government has paused the importation of millions of pounds of toxic PFAS “forever chemical” waste from the Netherlands following intense backlash from residents near a North Carolina facility that would receive the substances.

Local media last month revealed the Environmental Protection Agency had quietly approved a permit for chemical manufacturer Chemours to import about 4m lbs of waste over the next year, sparking fears of further pollution in a region already thoroughly contaminated by the company’s operations.

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A German climate technology company has launched a solution that enables corporate buyers to purchase biochar credits in advance from emissions removal activities in the agriculture sector, it announced on Wednesday.

The philanthropy arms of investment bank UBS and Swiss Re have agreed to invest over $2 million in a partnership with an Indonesia-based company that works to secure investments for scalable nature-based start-ups.

Consensus needs to be established across different frameworks for how to precisely define and implement insetting if it is to effectively scale as a solution for tackling corporate Scope 3 emissions, according to a study published Wednesday.

The committee steering Japan’s J-Credit programme has approved a new methodology on the introduction of a new feeding practice for beef cattle, as the government continues to expand coverage in the domestic offset scheme.

A large Danish shipping and logistics firm has signed a green hydrogen offtake agreement with a Chinese clean energy multinational, saying the deal is the first of its kind in the global shipping industry.